ABBEY MULCAHY: Hi there. My name is Abbey Mulcahy from the Minnesota Daily, and welcome to The Daily Beat, our podcast dedicated to the arts and entertainment scene of the Twin Cities. If you’re someone who listens to our podcast often, you might not be super familiar with me or my voice, so I thought I would introduce myself to you before we get into the meat of the episode.

Like I said, my name is Abbey and I am the new arts and entertainment editor at The Daily. I’ve worked as a reporter for The Daily since this past fall, writing a variety of stories about theater, music, festivals, and all sorts of things, arts and culture around University of Minnesota campus and the Twin Cities.

About a month ago, I took over as editor after our past editor, Sophia Arndt, graduated. So I’m super excited to be more active doing these podcasts and to continue to indulge in the super rich and vibrant art scene that we have in the Twin Cities. 

I thought that we could start off this new podcast run by talking about this really reinvigorated obsession or passion with horror movies.

This year has seen some really strong horror films come out, and I’ve just noticed a really powerful response to people’s responses to these films. They seem to be really engaged in not only consuming horror movies, but also looking deeper beyond what they see on the screens, digging into characters, motivations, complex plots, what this means on a societal level.

I figured we’d take some time today to go over some of these new horror movies and dig into why these movies are sticking with us so much and why people are kind of coming around to the horror genre in ways that they might not have before.

I will try to stay away from revealing the fun plot twists and secrets that come out, ’cause these films are so full of little details that really tie it all together. But I can’t guarantee that this will be without spoilers. So listen at your own risk.

To dip our toes into this topic, I thought a good place to start would be just by going over some of the films that have come out and have been garnering a pretty big response online.

One that I have seen so much response to—and that we just published an article about—is Obsession. Another one is Backrooms, which for similar reasons to Obsession, has really kind of been floating around the minds of younger moviegoers, and just sparking a lot of discussion online about the horror genre.

But this room has also seen some other interesting things come out as well. Hokum is a movie that I actually just saw in the theaters about a month ago. It’s a little bit of this supernatural, folklorish, thriller, horror energy that’s a little bit of a mystery at the same time.

There’s a lot of layers, and interestingly it really does integrate that tradition of folklore into it. 

Forbidden Fruits, I don’t know if I would classify this as a true horror, but I think it is a thriller in its own right, so I think I added it to this little list as well. That one is pretty fun. Follows four girls working in a mall, but something is a little interesting about the store that they all work at. That’s kind of all I’m gonna tell you about it. 

It stars one of my favorite horror actresses, Victoria Pedretti. If you’re a fan of that and a fan of Victoria Pedretti, highly recommend that you go check out Forbidden Fruits. It’s a little bit more of a light-hearted thriller as well, for those who are not as accustomed or comfortable with some of the slashing and gore and death that permeates the horror genre.

There are two films that I haven’t seen but thought that I would add to this introductory list as well, one being Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which for any fans of The Pitt, does in fact feature Shaun Hatosy, who plays Dr. Abbott in The Pitt. So if you’re a Pitt fan and you wanna try out some horror with a little bit of action and a tinge of gore, well Ready or Not 2 might be the film for you.

Earlier this year, the movie The Bride also came out, a film that Maggie Gyllenhaal directed, but also starred Jessie Buckley, who just won an Oscar for her role in Hamnet.

I also haven’t seen that one, but we do have a review posted on the website if you wanna learn a little bit more. 

But I bring up these movies not just to give you an easy introduction into the topic, but also because they’re so different, and they talk about a ton of different angles of horror, different ways to approach this one genre that doesn’t really have a single definition. 

I think horror is a really special genre because there’s no one way to do it. And you can say that about anything, about romance, about action. But when it comes to horror, and it comes to being vulnerable and scared and sitting in that theater with all the lights off, and it’s just you and that screen, I feel like something special happens.

The first film that I think we should dig into on this list is Obsession, which I don’t know about you guys, but whether I’m opening Instagram or talking with my friends or simply even just scrolling on my phone and looking for a movie to see, I have heard so much about Obsession.

Last Thursday, I decided to see Obsession. And at first I was a little bit scared because a lot of my friends had seen it, and they said that it was not something I would want to go alone to.

But I went anyways, and it was so much fun. I’ve been a horror fan for a couple years, but something about Obsession really makes it stand out. One thing about it that is true for another film on this list is that it comes from a younger director and more of an independent background than some of the other films that we see hitting our screens.

It was created by Kareem Barker, who is just 26 years old from Alabama. He got his start with filming by making YouTube videos with one of his friends, Cooper Tomlinson, and they just made sketch comedy. He continued with these comedy projects, and in 2024, he made a found footage horror film titled Milk and Serial. Not cereal, the type you eat, but serial, S-E-R-I-A-L. And that was released onto YouTube. 

Obsession I guess like the first huge film that he’s done, came out. It had just a budget of $750,000, and it was released mid-May. And since then, just to give you a little bit of a, I don’t know, just to show you how huge the impact of this film has been, it has grossed over $305 million worldwide.

It’s just such a huge success, and given that the budget wasn’t even $1 million, I think that speaks to it’s not just the money behind the film that’s making it succeed. There’s something about the aspects, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the actors, the costuming, the effects, everything, all these fine details are really what make the movie, not the budget behind it.

And since its release, it’s become Focus Features’ highest grossing film of all time.

To give you a little bit of a synopsis, Obsession is a film about a girl named Nikki and a guy named Bear.

Bear is a socially awkward, yet hopeful young man who works in the same music store as Nikki. They’ve been friends for a while, and he’s been harboring these feelings for her. But instead of declaring them or asking or testing the waters in the way that many of us would try, he decides to buy something called the “One Wish Willow,” which claims to grant whatever wish you make.

So he uses that One Wish Willow, makes a wish that she will love him, and the rest is history. And the old adage of be careful what you wish for has never been more true.

Because when you wish for someone’s love for you, you can’t control where that love begins and where it ends. It really forces us to confront what it means to love somebody and what it means to have control and autonomy over our own bodies and our own desires, and how far you can extend that control into other people’s lives.

It’s definitely a film that is worth the watch. You may need to exit the theater after it’s over and have a debrief session with your friends. I did observe many groups around me doing that, and I think that makes it all the more fun. 

Even though the movie has an endpoint, the discourse that it spurs after you watch it seems to continue well beyond theaters. Highly recommend that one. 

In the same vein, however, we have Backrooms, which was created by Kane Parsons. And much like Curry Barker, Kane Parsons is yet another young filmmaker, he’s just 21 years old, which actually makes him younger than me.

He began publishing a web series titled “Backrooms” on YouTube in early 2022 based on a creepypasta legend of the same name. And if you aren’t super internet-brained, that’s okay. Creepypastas are an early genre of internet horror legends. So there are so many creepypastas. If you know Slenderman, he’s in that realm. So Backrooms comes from a similar beginning. 

So in Backrooms, a struggling and divorced furniture store owner discovers some sort of interdimensional, endless, yellow-stained wall, liminal space that is through the basement. And he ends up exploring this space alongside his therapist, and it is twisting, and it is maze-like, and there’s just things in this abyss, this endless yellow-walled abyss, that don’t really make a whole lot of sense.

And not only is it confronting a creature that is otherworldly to you, but it also forces this furniture store owner, Clark, to confront parts about his own trauma, his own psychological past, that kind of manifest in front of him in this space. So I know that’s not the most detailed synopsis, but it’s one of those things that you have to experience for yourself.

But if you want to engage with some of the pre-movie material, the series that Kane Parsons has on YouTube is still up, and I watched some of it myself the other day. And I can totally see how that translates into the movie that we have before us now. Backrooms, like Obsession, has also been a huge hit, and that’s not entirely because of its YouTube roots, but it most certainly has something to do with it.

The movie, which was also released in May, has grossed over $267 million worldwide, according to IMDb’s Box Office Mojo. And the film has become A24’s highest grossing film to date, which, if you know anything about movies, A24 puts out some brilliant films, so the fact that Backrooms is among that group of movies and is also leading the pack says a lot.

And Backrooms made Parsons the youngest filmmaker in history to have achieved a number one opening at the box office. The movie also, much like Obsession, had a small budget. It was just $10 million, and just on opening weekend alone, it had collected $81 million across North American theaters. So yet another financial success, but also just cultural success.

So many people are familiar with it, and whether they’re in love with Backrooms or a little bit confused by it, they’re still talking about it. Attention is a currency, especially in the internet age, so that so many people are feeling motivated by these films to engage in cinema and engage in these movie-oriented dialogues, says a lot about the power of these films.

I put both of these films up here in a bit of a comparison largely because of their young directors.

A lot of films that we see on the screen, regardless of the talent and the work behind them, are propelled by people who are older and have been engaged in the industry for years. And while that doesn’t devalue those films in any way, having a younger perspective that is reflective of Gen Z’s interests, the ways that Gen Z people consume media and how they interpret it, definitely is showing up

Film and media Studies professor Matt Rapaport at Tufts University told Tufts Now, about Obsession and Backrooms that, quote, “It’s fascinating to watch the way studios are looking for new talented people who already have a clear aesthetic and audience. They are looking to capitalize on the fact that we have a generation of people who have grown up on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, and a generation of creators who have cultivated these audiences.”Unquote. 

And I think that quote really speaks to what both Kane Parsons and Curry Barker have done with these films. Both of them engaged in some sort of YouTube creation before they made it big. And that allowed them to cultivate and practice and really hone their artistic visions. But YouTube also isn’t a one-way street.

You have creators making things, putting their time, effort, and energy into a product, and then you have audience members able to like or dislike a video, share it with their friends, leave a comment. In a way, it’s almost like an interactive movie space where you have kind of like a workshop. You have a product in front of you, and you have the ability to respond as a creator to what your audience is proposing, critiquing, or complimenting.

And in that way, you can test out new ideas you might have, new approaches, and not that you ever need to compromise your artistic vision, but you can integrate what those around you think is valuable and think is interesting.

The way in which these younger creators approach making movies, like Professor Rapaport said, it’s different and studios are realizing that. There’s a reason A24 picked up this film, and same for Focus Features, because it’s really grabbing this generation who has grown up on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat. Audiences feel differently involved than perhaps they did in the past.

This good year for horror that we’re having is riding on the heels of the wonderful film year we had in 2025. On the screens we saw Sinners, we saw K-Pop Demon Hunters, there was One Battle After Another, Weapons with its own interesting, unsettling take on horror. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Zootopia 2, Superman. So there were just a lot of really good movies that came out that year, and you can tell by a couple of the ones that I listed that horror was also on the screen, and we were looking at it in a way that we hadn’t before.

And I think Sinners is really emblematic of this. If you have listened to our podcast in the past, you’ve most definitely heard mention of the A&E’s desk love of Sinners, and love of Michael B. Jordan, which I think is the only correct Michael B. Jordan opinion to have.

But I wanna talk a little bit about Sinners and how that has led us into this year’s obsession with horror. Sinners is set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta. Michael B. Jordan plays two twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, who return to their hometown in the Jim Crow South from Chicago with money and a dream to open up a juke joint for the Black community in their town because everyone needs a place to dance and gather and be merry and have fun.

But things don’t quite go to plan. And some sort of supernatural force, not to spoil anything for you guys, interfere with these plans, and it has repercussions on pretty much the entire community that’s gathered there.

So it says a lot, and it says it in a really beautiful and meaningful way. And it was a fantastic movie that came out this past year, and it was very properly awarded for that. At the Oscars, it won Best Actor— Michael B. Jordan—Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score on top of a slew of other nominations

That being said, Sinners was a blockbuster from the start, directed by Ryan Coogler, who is a critically acclaimed American director who debuted on the scene in 2013 with his feature length film, Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan, Melanie Diaz, and Octavia Spencer. He’s also well known for directing Black Panther

Sinners, I remember when it came out going to the theater because people who had seen it before me were insistent on getting others to go and to appreciate this art.

And I think a lot of people didn’t expect the horror twist that went along with it. Because you’re not confronted by horror from the get-go, I think it forces you to get comfortable with the characters, the main characters, understand why they are doing what they’re doing, and in some ways to join their team and root for them.

When the evil forces come onto the scene and you see them and you see how they’re disturbing this piece that you have gotten comfortable with, it really forces you to sit back and analyze beyond just, okay, supernatural beings are messing up their night. 

I think another really strong point that Sinners won was showing that horror is for, and can include, anyone. We’ve seen in more recent years films that star people of color in horror films, not just as a side character in a slasher that gets killed first or second, but as main characters whose personal histories, and even just cultural histories, play important roles in the narrative.

Get Out is one of these. And I think Sinners is another where you cannot remove the setting of being in the 1930s South from this movie. It is integral to not only just the characters, but also the way that the horror resonates when audiences take it in. 

Having had Sinners in 2025, people have been more open and interested in seeing how horror can twist or augment our typical perceptions of movies. Because at the core of Obsession is romance, is love, is desire, is affection, is a relationship.

And we’ve all seen rom-coms and the soapy, sappy romances, and those are fantastic. But when you add an element of thrill, of fear, it makes you interpret that relationship in a different way and pay attention to, like I said earlier, those aspects of control and freedom and autonomy and independence in a way that you might not confront if you’re watching The Notebook. Although those themes are often still there, they just manifest differently. 

So on a broader level, I think when we look and when we examine why people are so into horror, one of the answers is that it’s such a wide-reaching and all-encompassing genre. On the one hand, you have psychological horror, where films use psychological tension, fear, and suspense to really evoke those feelings of dread and unease in yourself.

In older movies, we can see this in Rosemary’s Baby, Silence of the Lambs. But in these 2026 selections, I think you can also argue that Obsession is psychological horror. We are seeing how Nikki’s mind is being tormented by this wish and how her true self is being tucked away while this wish-bound, love-heart-eyed Nikki is pushed to the front.

And even in Hokum, which we didn’t really talk a ton about today, there are still those elements of psychological torment. The question at the end of the movie ends up being, without giving too many spoilers, was any of this real?

And what does it mean for a supernatural event to be real? Is seeing real? Is physically experiencing something real? Or is believing and thinking that it happened enough for it to be real? 

Psychological horror allows you to walk away with honestly more questions than answers sometimes. But I think that’s one of the reasons we’re so drawn into it, because it forces you and prompts you to examine things without always wrapping it up in a neat little bow.

When Obsession ends, I said I saw people debriefing outside the theater, and that was no figurative device. That is true. Because you walk out of there, and I think most people end up having their own reactions to it and their own strong feelings about right and wrong, freedom versus confinement, and all of that.

In addition to psychological horror we have the slashers, the high-octane action side of things, where you have a killer on a spree and victims running at summer camps or running around cornfields. Think Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th. There are also so many modern slashers, too, that are really good fun. I love a good slasher. I think they’re like the action movie of the horror genre, and I think it’s a good balance to have after being, having your mind toyed with other movies. 

One of my favorite things about horror is that there are so many films that kind of are just their own thing. They don’t fit into a neat categorization. Alien is one of these. I think you could say thriller, you could say suspense film, sci-fi of course, but sci-fi and horror have a lot of overlap.

But I think it’s a little bit of everything. You have this supernatural alien creature—and Sigourney Weaver, love Sigourney Weaver—but you have something otherworldly, but you also have a little bit of body horror, but it’s also psychoanalytical. It says a lot about our unconscious desires. Like what does an alien do when it kind of takes on a bit of a procreation motherly role? 

Like, there’s just so much about that film that draws from a bunch of different genres. But at its core, it’s a little bit scary, and it gets your heartbeat going. So I think that it falls into that horror category as well. 

Beyond horror just being such an all-encompassing genre, I think another reason is that people kinda like to be scared sometimes.

After you come home from your 9 to 5 internship or your morning shift at a coffee shop, or even if you were going on a hike that day, sometimes it’s fun to sit down, dim the lights, and put something on that you know is going to get your heart beating a little bit faster. 

In addition to studying journalism I do some English and cultural studies as well. And movies like horror, and this is true for science fiction as well, they allow you to see your world and the problems in your world from a removed and extrapolated perspective.

And what I mean when I say this is when you see a family in a horror movie living in a haunted house, they have their own problems between persons: mom and dad might be fighting, the siblings might be on their own journeys and disappointing their parents or this or that. But then at the center of everything, you have this force that’s terrifying them, and you’re able to analyze what it means for this family to exist with these problems but from another perspective.

You’re not seeing them simply talking through their arguments. You’re seeing them challenge the barriers that stand between them because some other force is pushing them to do so. At the root of it, horror just allows us and encourages us to look at commonplace things with a new perspective.

We see this in Obsession where Bear breaks that “One Wish Willow, makes his wish, and Nikki’s behavior changes at the drop of a hat.

The simplest explanation in that case might just be that she’s having a psychotic break, but we, the audience, know better. We understand that this was some external manipulation, and she has so little control over what’s happening to her. It makes us think of these bigger ideas in that there are things really complicated at play.

And Obsession is speaking to what’s happening in the movie, but there’s no way it exists in isolation. All of Bear’s motivations reflect what we are seeing outside with young people struggling to make these social connections and be forthcoming with each other, and instead going on these roundabout ways to achieving their goals.

And so we’re forced to sit with that and realize why that’s a problem. That’s a really important and key strength of the horror genres. 

There’s so much to say about horror and so many recommendations to give. From this year, again, you gotta return to that list that we went through at the beginning. Go catch Backrooms and Obsession, of course, but also see Hokum.

Try Forbidden Fruits if you’re looking for something that’s a little bit more bubbly. And then Ready or Not 2 and The Bride are also there.

If you’re looking to catch one of these newer 2026 horror movies, a lot of them are still playing in theaters.

Thank you for tuning in on my first solo podcast. Pretty exciting.  Once again, this is Abbey Mulcahy, and thank you for listening. This podcast was produced by Grace Aigner, and if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, you can reach us at [email protected].  Bye-bye.